The 7 Graces of Life – How We WORK is How We LIVE

Community Blogger Paula Tarrant explores how the 7 Graces can influence more than just our businesses, and how we can apply them to our personal lives.

As an entrepreneur, business owner or sole practitioner, the lines between our work life and our personal life can become blurred. We bring work home, work from our kitchen tables, and work from our laptops in cafes. We decide when ‘the shop’ will be open and which holidays it will be closed. Sometimes we work extra-long hours when a deadline looms, or when the Muse awakens us in the middle of the night with inspiration.

The work-life rhythm and flow of the self-employed is very different from that of traditionally employed folks. Our work, and how we work, informs the rest of our lives. Work becomes our pleasure, our community. As traditional communities are beginning to fall apart around the world, new ways of building community are needed. One of these ways is through personal business, from the one person micro-business all the way to the company that began as one person’s creative idea.

Marketing and Life

So, how can businesses build community? Through their marketing – especially if they use the 7 Graces way of marketing. The 7 Graces of Marketing is more than just a tutorial about how to do marketing. It’s also a guide for how to be with marketing. It’s this distinction that sets it apart and has led to its becoming a beacon for paradigm change in the world of commerce.

And it is the 7 Graces approach to growing a business from the inside out that makes it such an attractive and natural guide for growing our lives in a similar way. I call it the 7 Graces of Life. Work, life and play: the lines are all blurring. It’s all becoming One Life. How we work is how we live, which means, if we practice the 7 Graces in our business marketing, we can also use them as a framework for how we engage with life.

Your Business Code of Conduct

Let’s look at the 7 Graces Marketing Code of Conduct. If you haven’t taken a few minutes to go through it before, then this is a good opportunity to begin to understand what sets the 7 Graces apart from marketing-as-usual, and how it implements the intention of “creating harmonious relationships with people, our economy and the delicate ecological balance of our natural world.” This is the 7 Graces mission statement and its purpose.

Each Grace is an amplification and a way of transmitting that purpose into the world. Here they are at a quick glance.

“Connection: All things in the world are a part of Creation, and therefore, are connected. We use our business to magnify the many connections that are possible.

Inspiration: We give value and share wisdom freely, with the intention to empower and instill trust.

Invitation: We create an open, hospitable, engaging environment that naturally creates the desire for connection.

Directness: We believe in ‘plainspeak’ that uses direct and clear language.

Transparency: Expressing true values through marketing allows an audience to know and trust the essence of who you are.

Abundance: There is enough for all when we choose to live in harmony and rhythm with the planet and each other.

Collaboration: Working together builds stronger communities and creates something greater collectively than the sum of the parts.”

What would it look like for you if you had a mission statement of your life purpose? What would it mean if you created a way to apply the 7 Graces in your life? How would your 7 Graces of Life be distinct from the application of the 7 Graces of marketing above?

We have entered the era of the values-driven marketplace where we make buying decisions based on meaning, on how we want to feel and what story we want to tell about ourselves.

Your Personal Code of Conduct

If you haven’t yet articulated what values drive you and what story you want to be telling about who you are and what you do, then starting with the 7 Graces of Life is a good beginning.

When we look closer, we see that Connection to an Intelligent Source is at the beginning. What that means and how you design that in your life is unique to you. From there, Inspiration (to breathe life into) becomes the energy that builds connection. How will you engage with that energy?

Invitation will create the way to authentically connect with others who will also want to connect with you. Directness can help you have richer relationships that are built on respect, trust and admiration. Transparency means you know who you are and what you stand for, and allows you shine your light brightly in the world.

Abundance frees you from living a life based on fear. Deciding what your life looks like and how you express abundance is uniquely yours. Ultimately, it will include Collaboration, because we are all connected, and an abundance of ideas, resources, energy and relationships makes life that much richer.

When you create the way you will live using the 7 Graces of Life, you will find that you end up back where you began, at Connection. The feeling of moving step-by-step through the Graces will fall away as they become threads that are woven together in the fabric of your life. Your beautiful life. Your beautiful business. Your beautiful experience of the world.

What’s Next?

Can you feel the possibilities? I invite you to think about how you are integrating the 7 Graces of Marketing into your business and then think about how you can take them further and start practicing the 7 Graces of Life.

And, if you really feel inspired, please feel free to share your personal mission statement of purpose and the Graces that mean the most to you in the comments box below.

Paula Tarrant
30 April 2014

PAULA TARRANT is a certified spiritual life coach and licensed Profit from Your Passion Coach who specializes in helping women who seek to live and work with more creativity and authenticity. She is known for her signature blend of spiritual, practical and creative principles that provide the framework for moving beyond self-doubt and fear and designing, instead, a life and livelihood that’s built around your natural gifts and passions. She is a graduate of the 7 Graces Foundations of Ethical Marketing course, and is currently on the 7 Graces Applications of Ethical Marketing certification programme.

Then please subscribe using the form at the upper right side of this page, so you can receive our articles to your inbox.

KINDLE users

You can help subsidise ethical marketing training courses for young social entrepreneurs in need. Just subscribe to the blog on Amazon for 99 cents a month (77p UK), and you’ll receive all our articles delivered directly to your Kindle device. All profits go to our 7 Graces Scholarship Fund. You can take a 14-day free trial before you decide. You’ll get a new article 2 or 3 times per week. Check it out atAmazon US or Amazon UK.

Looking for a Tribe?

Come join our 7 Graces group on Facebook, and join us at our monthly meetings. They’re free to attend and we have them both in person and online, so you can participate from anywhere in the world. This is NOT a “business group” but an active community where people actually know and support each other.

Find out more about how changing the paradigm can help make the world a better place:

Lynn is also the Founder of the 7 Graces Project CIC, a not-for-profit social enterprise created to train, support, mentor and inspire independent business owners to market their business ethically, serve society and planet, and restore all that is best about humanity.